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Hal Steinbrenner Plots New Course for Yankees

Hal Steinbrenner has said he wants to shrink the player payroll by about $18 million by the end of the 2014 season and to keep it under $200 million from then on.Credit
Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

TAMPA, Fla. — On Oct. 17, in the hours before Game 4 of the American League Championship Series was scheduled to begin, a steady, gloomy rain fell on Detroit. Sitting in his hotel room, Hal Steinbrenner watched the downpour and frowned. And then his phone rang.

It was Randy Levine, the Yankees’ president, and with the game in danger of being postponed, he thought it was vital to contact his boss. Not to inform Steinbrenner of the weather, but to get his assessment of it.

In fact, the people at Major League Baseball had asked Levine to make the call, knowing that Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ managing general partner, is perhaps baseball’s most educated weather forecaster. As an experienced pilot — a diversion he only half-jokingly said was a way to seek sanctuary from his overbearing father — Hal Steinbrenner not only was trained in meteorology but seemed to have a gift for it, too.

So he pulled out his iPad and laptop, called up the appropriate weather applications and aviation programs, and set to work calculating the probabilities of rain in the hours ahead. After checking the radar, the barometric pressure, the existing conditions and the atmospheric trends in the area, Steinbrenner concurred with the people in Detroit. The game had to be postponed.

It was not unusual that Steinbrenner was consulted — Yankees officials often seek his counsel when the weather threatens to delay or postpone a game. On numerous occasions, at home or in his Tampa office, he has been looking at radar and telling people hundreds of miles away at Yankee Stadium that they were failing to notice a front that would push the rain away, or a line of showers moving in from the south. His meteorological record is so good, Levine said, that on rainy days even the umpires ask, “What does Hal think?”

“If you could get on the line and hear how he speaks, it’s amazing,” said Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager. “He’s got all the lingo and everything. He’s definitely the best at it. I have 100 percent faith in what Hal says.”

The question for the Yankees these days, though, is how Steinbrenner assesses the storm clouds that seem to be gathering over the team after a run of success that has included 17 postseason appearances in the last 18 seasons.

The Yankees have the oldest roster in the majors, and key players will be out with injuries until at least the middle of May. At the same time, Steinbrenner is intent on shrinking the payroll by roughly $18 million by the end of the 2014 season, and to keep it under $200 million thereafter.

The Yankees have abdicated the crown as baseball’s biggest spenders. The Los Angeles Dodgers now have a bigger payroll than the Yankees, and Steinbrenner seems content to keep it that way, even if some would like the holes on the current roster to be filled with an expensive acquisition or two.

But as with his weather maps, Steinbrenner has significant statistical data at hand, particularly evidence showing that only once has a team with a $200 million payroll (the 2009 Yankees) won a World Series.

“My firmly held belief is that you don’t have to have a $200 million payroll to be world champion,” he said last week in the team’s plush conference room at the spring training complex here. “And the historical data that led me to that conclusion is rock solid.”

As a result, Steinbrenner is charting his own path for the Yankees — a decided change of course from the philosophy of his father, George, a political conservative but a liberal spender if ever there was one.

At 43, Hal Steinbrenner is different from his father in other ways, too. His demeanor is calm, even understated, and he is unlikely to be intrigued by hosting “Saturday Night Live” or dressing up as a modern-day King George and sitting atop a white steed for the cover of Sports Illustrated, which his father did 20 years ago.

Photo

Close to his father on the ground, Hal Steinbrenner found a sanctuary in the air.Credit
Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Still, as the team’s managing general partner since 2009, he also seems to have acquired a good deal of his father’s self-confidence and authoritative presence, and appears comfortable in taking the Yankees where he thinks they need to go, even if many people are concerned it is a different place from where his father took them.

“I’m not trying to beat him,” he said of his father as he sat in the conference room. “I’m not trying to be better than he was, because he was absolutely great at what he did. I can only be what I am, and the things I think are important, I will pursue.”

It was never easy being a son of George Steinbrenner, despite the obvious material benefits. Hal Steinbrenner has spent half his life working for the Yankees, a sometimes hazardous and often stressful occupation for anyone working for his father, but even more so for him.

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“They took their share enough that they thought I didn’t get any worse,” Steinbrenner said of his colleagues. “But I did. The one thing I joke about is that we could have a horrible, horrible day at work here with him, but the one thing they don’t have to deal with is he doesn’t show up at their house to play with their kids that night. We would get home and I’d be like, ‘I love him to death and my kids love him, but not tonight.’ It’s definitely different what I went through than what they did.”

Which is where the flying came in. Ever since he was a child, Hal Steinbrenner loved just about everything connected to aviation. He would construct model airplanes of World War II vintage, or make replicas of more modern aircraft like the F-14 Tomcat, his favorite plane. The test pilot Chuck Yeager was his hero, and “The Right Stuff” was one of his favorite movies.

In 2001, he was living on Davis Islands in Tampa when he began taking flying lessons. He learned on a Cessna 172 and now flies a 182, a four-seater with a range of about 800 miles. But Steinbrenner does not use the plane for travel. It is a way for him to relax and escape.

He likes that his cellphone does not work at 5,000 feet. Similarly, when he first learned to fly, he relished the fact that his father would never go up with him, that it was the perfect escape from all that bluster and thunder.

“I’m sure others felt that way, too,” he said with a laugh. “They just can’t fly. They ran. He was a tough boss, no doubt about it.”

For Hal Steinbrenner, the purpose of flying is to have fun, to practice approaches and landings, but never to take off into stormy conditions. His meteorological expertise, so useful to the Yankees on rainy days, pretty much guarantees that he will not make that mistake. He never flies in bad weather.

But what about the team? Is he reading the situation correctly? Can the Yankees remain a dominant club without spending as much money? Many fans, used to years of excess, worry that they cannot.

“Do I like it when the fans are upset at me and think I’m not doing a good job?” Steinbrenner said. “I wouldn’t be human if it didn’t get to me somewhat, because I do care what they think. But nonetheless, what I feel is best for my family, the organization, our partners, I’m going to go with that.”

In the 2009 A.L.C.S. between the Yankees and the Los Angeles Angels, the weather service that the Yankees subscribe to recommended that one game be postponed. Steinbrenner looked at the radar and saw it differently, and he suggested playing through. The game went on without delay.

“It’s really a big deal to cancel an L.C.S. game,” he said. “It looked like things were dissipating and a line of showers were going into dry air once it hit the coast.

“I’m not an expert,” he added. “I only saw what I saw, and I could have been wrong as easily as I could have been right.”

He was right that night. Yankees fans and, for that matter, players hope that he is also right about changing the team’s course and that he is not, somehow, flying into a storm.

A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2013, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: If Anyone Knows Storm Clouds, It’s Hal Steinbrenner. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe